From the Fields: Thomas Chandler, ​​​​​​​Fresno County tree crop and winegrape farmer

By Thomas Chandler
Fresno County tree crop and winegrape farmer

It’s been unusually mild weather. We had a couple rainstorms that impacted our winegrape harvest. We could not get the sugar levels that we wanted. The winery wants sugar levels to be a certain minimum because they want to use it for juice concentrate. We needed to get minimum 23 brix, and we did not get that requirement. 

The winegrape industry is discouraging. It was a good year for the crop but not good for demand domestically. That’s been frustrating. It’s good we have long-term contracts, but it’s still a challenge. We must have almost perfect fruit to do well with the wineries now because they are full of grapes. There are oversupply issues throughout the state, even in the coastal area. 

We’re expecting the almond price to be strong because of the lower crop that the industry had. We’re pulling out older orchards and going back into almonds. A reason for that is we feel we’re in an area that has good water, so we should hopefully be one of the last people standing and continue to grow almonds.  

We’re hoping to soil fumigate before Dec. 1. We’re trying to quickly do whole-orchard recycling, to grind and incorporate the grindings into the soil before the end of November. We’re getting our field ready for planting more almonds with the rest of the almonds we’re keeping. On our mature almonds, we’re applying foliar fertilizer—boron and zinc.

What we’re doing different this year is we are applying compost for the first time. We’re getting ready to put compost on all our crops—almonds, citrus and winegrapes. The idea is to add more organic matter back into the soil as well as try to increase the potassium and phosphorus in the soil. I hope within the next seven years, we’ll see a change in the soil health. The added organic matter should help with water retention. We do have sandier soils, so that should help.

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